US History

U.S. History Study Guide

12.16 Republicans and Democrats Face Off Lincoln-Douglas Debates In the 1858 midterm elections, Republicans and Democrats faced off for the first time. The most visible of these battles took place in Illinois, where prominent Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas faced a reelection challenge in the form of Republican Abraham Lincoln. This campaign pitted the Republican Party’s rising star, Lincoln, against the Democratic Party’s leading senator. In a series of seven debates known as the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Douglas advocated popular sovereignty while Lincoln espoused the free-soil argument. Douglas painted a picture of his opponent as an abolitionist and an advocate of racial equality and racial mixing, positions that were still very unpopular at the time. Lincoln countered that he was not an abolitionist, but that he simply opposed the extension of slavery into the territories, but did not aim to abolish slavery where it already existed, in the South. In an attack of his opponent, Lincoln challenged that Douglas’s belief in popular sovereignty, in particular his “Freeport Doctrine,” was incompatible with the Dred Scott decision. Freeport Doctrine In this doctrine, Douglas stated that territorial governments could effectively forbid slavery by refusing to enact slave codes, even though the Dred Scott decision had explicitly deprived Congress of the authority to restrict slavery in the territories. Outcome In the end, neither candidate emerged from the debates as the clear victor. Although Douglas won the Senate seat, he alienated Southern supporters by encouraging disobedience of the Dred Scott decision with his Freeport Doctrine. Lincoln, meanwhile, lost the election, but emerged to national prominence as a spokesman for antislavery interests. 12.17 The Impending Crisis Hinton Rowan Helper's Book The second greatest fear of Southern slaveholders was that Southern Whites who did not own slaves, by far the majority of the Southern population, would come to see the continuation of slavery as not being in their best interest. This fear was touched on by a book, “The Impending Crisis in the South”, by a North Carolinian named Hinton Rowan Helper. In it Helper argued that slavery was economically harmful to the South and that it enriched the large planter at the expense of the yeoman farmer. Southerners were enraged, and more so when the Republicans reissued a condensed version of the book as campaign literature. When the new House of Representatives met in December 1859 for the first time since the 1858 elections, angry Southerners determined that no Republican who had endorsed the book should be elected speaker. The Republicans were the most numerous party in the

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